Davon (Jesse T. Usher) wakes in a small town in Maine chained to the corpse of a woman called Amanda (Embeth Davidtz). His memory is shattered, and all he knows is everyone else thinks he’s killed her. Oh and that Amanda, his victim, is talking to him…

For a while, this is a hard episode to latch onto. The misty, cold setting and the deliberate standoffishness of the settlement Davon is rescued make this feel like a story at one remove. It’s the same basic format as others (and shares some stylistic and structural flare with ‘Blair/Gina’) but it feels colder, crueller.

It is. And as the episode goes on you realize just how dark it’s getting and just what’s happening.

Usher is great here, a thousand miles away from his preening A-Train in The Boys. Davon is by turns panicked, studious, compassionate, furious and guilt-ridden – often all at once. He’s one of the most grounded characters we’ve seen in a season defined by pragmatic leads and when he finally snaps in the final seconds it feels all  the more impactful.

It’s impossible to not discuss the fact this is a story about a white town deciding the only black man they know is a murderer. It’s rarely if ever said out loud but that tension runs through every scene and bursts in the final act in two brilliant, horrifying scenes. In the first, Davon is about to be crushed by construction equipment when he remembers a clue in the case. In the second, Davon confronts the murderer and at the exact point you realize he’s about to do something, he does it. This is a story about child murder. We see child walkers. We see the child who killed them and we know why he did it and that arguably is the most horrifying part: to spare them the horrors of the world.

It’s an idea the show has played with before but it’s never been starker than it is here. The murderer sees the world for what it is and it breaks him and he knows it. The settlement sees the world for what it is and welcomes a scapegoat when it’s offered to them because that’s easier than facing the truth. Hemingway talked about how life breaks us all and afterwards we’re stronger in the broken places. Hemingway never lived through this particular apocalypse.

Channing Powell’s razor sharp script pulls zero punches and gives Usher and Davidtz especially as his victim some wonderfully dense material to work with. This is basically zombie noir, especially thanks to the film-stock rattled flashbacks that Michael E. Satrazemis seems to have had great fun putting together. It works too and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar story, or style, in season 2.

Verdict: ‘Davon’ isn’t a fun watch but it’s always a compelling one. As brutally honest as ‘Dee’ it reminds us how unforgiving this world is and also how, even at the end of the world, people still make bad choices for worse reasons. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart